The 2016 Canon: Hell or High Water Paints a Portrait of a Real America That Many Ignored

As we bring 2016 to a close, Esquire.com looks back at the films, albums, and television shows that have shaped our year and will have a lasting influence on the culture at large. Read the complete series of essays here.

This has been a tough year, and a monumental one. The world has changed. In the United States, the election of Donald Trump marks a political turning point few expected, but maybe one we all should have seen coming. It was the product of an obvious malaise, and of a deep dissatisfaction with the power structures pushing us into a more diverse future. Culture will change, too. We see it already in the apparent normalization of the coming Trump administration. We will surely see it over the next four years as artists and creators have a chance to reckon with our new reality. It took four years before we got the first great films dealing with 9/11, Steven Spielberg's twofer of The War of the Worlds and Munich (neither of which were directly about 9/11).

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Looking back at 2016, it'd be too much to ask to find films that deal with Trump. Movies take too long to make. They couldn't have known. There is one film, though, that effectively captured our moment.

On a budget of only $12 million, David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water went on to gross $31 million in the last weeks of summer. The taut, well-acted bank robbery western stood out from the pack of disappointing sequels and giant-effects blockbusters. With little more than some beat up cars, a solid cast, and a great sense of place, Mackenzie took an excellent script and turned it into an excellent movie. If you're looking for quality entertainment for adults, Hell or High Water—a tale of two brothers robbing banks to pay off a lender before their oil-rich property gets forfeited and the Texas Rangers on their trail—is one of the best 2016 had to offer.

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Hell or High Water goes a step beyond mere entertainment, though. From its story of an economically depressed family, it draws out to take a wide view of the economic conditions of their West Texas setting. As the characters drive from county to county, passing myriad signs advertising debt solutions, foreclosed properties, and arid farmland, the film paints a picture of a world most in the so-called coastal liberal elite too often ignore. Much like The War of the Worlds and Munich were the first great films to deal with 9/11, primarily through abstraction, Hell or High Water may be the first truly great film about the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.

Hell or High Water paints a picture of a world most in the so-called coastal liberal elite too often ignore.

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Rather than offer a top-down view of how the great recession occurred, as films like The Big Short and Inside Job have attempted, Hell or High Water plants its audiences right in the aftermath. The effects of the recession on the rural towns of West Texas are starkly portrayed not as history lesson or polemics, but as a means of establishing character. The entire plot of the film is animated by the economic concerns left in the wake of the financial crisis. Their immediate dire straits, their loss of hope for a better future, and their extralegal methods for solving it—all are a reflection of America's financial collapse nearly eight years earlier.

Much has been made since November 8th of the idea that liberals, and many other elites, failed to predict the outcome of the election because they didn't understand the "white working class" who make up much of rural America. Calls for empathy abound: We must learn about these poor people and appeal to them with an economic message. It's as though we had never been exposed to them before. But that's not true at all. A film like Hell or High Water felt comfortable enough in Americans' broader understanding of the economy to set its story within that milieu. The problem was never in understanding the way poorer people hit hardest by the recession might feel about the country. Poor black people didn't vote for Trump, for example. The divides in American society run far deeper than the present economic moment.

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Released before Trump won the election, and conceived before he was even a serious factor in American politics, Hell or High Water offers a unique window into those divides. Jeff Bridges' Texas Ranger character, constantly cracking offensive jokes about Native Americans to his Native American partner, (who he obviously still admires and respects), is a man out of time. It's not that he's elderly, but that the world has progressed beyond him and left him behind. It's true both in social and racial terms. He knows the jokes are inappropriate, but he says them anyway, holding onto a more overtly racist past. It's also true in economic terms. Every town he visits in his hunt for the bank robbers is another wake up call to a world that once flourished and is now decaying, likely to die away forever very soon.

The bank-robbing brothers, played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, are similarly afflicted. Pine, though, has that dream of owning his own property, extracting its riches, and providing for his family. Amid the death of rural outskirts of West Texas lays some degree of hope, something to hold on to. In the film's final scene, after people have died and much pain has been inflicted, Jeff Bridges stands on Chris Pine's porch, staring at a man whose motivations were valid, and who achieved his goal, but at the severe cost of civility and perhaps the notion of civilization itself. There's a respect in Bridges' face, but also a disgust. It's the difference between mourning something lost and lashing out to retain it. Bridges is resigned to his fate. Pine isn't. Heroics are beside the point.

In that way, Hell or High Water presaged Trump's election. It was a film, in August, that imagined the destructive lengths to which a certain set of people would go to hold onto something they'd always felt was theirs. The racialized truth of this is clear, if not spelled out by the film. It's only two white characters left standing, after all. Now, in December, Hell or High Water stands as a film to revisit, to give us some insight into the mindset that led us down this road, and to reckon with the troubling reality of its underlying validity, and its even deeper underlying destructiveness. What the answers will be are anyone's guess. Hell or High Water stops short of offering any, leaving us to find our own way out. If anything better exemplifies the moral morass in which we find ourselves headed into 2017, I don't know what does.

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